How Jack O’Brien Learned to Direct: Watching, Doing, and Living to Tell
In a new memoir, the longtime Old Globe leader and frequent Broadway helmer considers an eventful career and offers tips he picked up the hard way.
Category Archives: Books
Mr. Abbott Meets the Kid: The Care and Feeding of the Revival
In this excerpt from his new memoir ‘Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct,’ Jack O’Brien recounts his fierce face-off with theatre giant George Abbott.
Are We Selling Experiences or Serving Communities?
In excerpts from their new book, Anthony S. Rhine and Jay Pension answer important questions about audience engagement practices in nonprofit arts.
Les Waters: Theatre Spaces and Thin Places
In excerpts from a new book, the British-born director talks about childhood mysteries, the theatre buildings he’s worked in, and his fascination with erasure and contradictions.
Life During Wartime: The Backdrop of Kenny Leon’s ‘Much Ado’
How a Shakespeare in the Park production taught this designer that ‘political theatre’ could mean something different for Black and white Americans.
A Lost ‘Member’: The Mary Rodgers Musical That Wasn’t
In this excerpt from ‘Shy,’ the brutally frank memoir Rodgers wrote with Jesse Green, a Carson McCullers adaptation takes shape, then founders.
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
Composer Mary Rodgers’s unsparing new memoir, equal parts hilarious and harrowing, tells of an eventful life in which musical theatre wasn’t the only source of drama.
The Red Stuff: A Guide to Letting It Bleed Onstage
Jennifer McClure’s new book provides a prop master’s guide to blood effects, from design to clean-up and every sanguinary step in between.
Customs of the Stage Tribe
This excerpt from a new book introducing performers to the unique world of the stage actor covers some of its unique rituals and traditions.
Fragments, Loss, and Language: On the Jewishness of Pinter and Stoppard
An excerpt from a new book about the lessons learned from staging the work of 2 major English writers.
